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Subject:Re: RoboHelp-the adventure begins From:"Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher -at- EXPERSOFT -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 21 Nov 1996 10:54:10 -0800
At 10:30 AM 11/20/96 CST, Julie A. E. Tholen wrote:
>I've just been green-lighted to develop on-line help for a new tool with RoboHelp
> How much and what kind of programmer involvment is
>required? We will be having training on the tool, but I need this information
>for my deliverable plan.
Your programmer involvement will be minimal, Julie. Mostly, it
depends on the language they use, but you mentioned C++ so I'll
assume...
When they have all (or most of) the dialog boxes, etc., defined in
their .rc (resource) file, they'll need to run makehelp. This
will produce a .hm file with all the dialog box help IDs defined.
(the IDs should mostly be obvious from their names, but you may
need some guidance on which ID goes to which dialog box). You take
the .hm file and attach it to robo. Then, when you create a context-
sensitive help topic, you use the help ID string from the .hm file
as the context string for the topic (select it from the list in the
topic definition dialog). When you put the help file and
the program in the same directory, the links are automagic.
If you're doing "What's this?" help, the programmers have the additional
chore of adding an array of widget IDs to the dialog box definition.
If the programmers are in the habit of reusing dialog boxes (common in
MFC-based applications [Microsoft Foundation Classes]), they need to
supply different help IDs to each different instance of the dialog box.
Sue Gallagher
sgallagher -at- expersoft -dot- com
-- The _Guide_ is definitive.
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
